Do the hustle...

I've been a bit tied up lately so you can talk about anything. A few deniers are talking about this, or something.

Rumour has it that Sarah Palin didn't get to see what she has been raving about.

Raucous stupidity at WUWT with Charles G. Battig

While Anthony Watts is away there have been some articles at WUWT. The latest one was a copy of a letter by a conspiracy theorist called Charles G. Battig. He's appeared here before in an hysterical frame of mind. Charles retired some time ago to take up science denial. In his letter to the Editor (archived here), he starts by claiming that stupidity is not a handicap in politics. That may be the case or not. It's a handicap when trying to make points that contradict all known science, which is what Charles Battig does. He wrote:

Behind these claims is the unsubstantiated assertion global climate change is driven primarily by manmade CO2, and that there is a magic CO2 knob to set climate to a Utopian level. 

First of all, science shows that global temperature, and hence climate, is controlled by the amount of atmospheric CO2. That's been known for a very long time. Back in the 1800s there were even newspaper articles in remote rural Australia, that informed people of this known fact. As for his "Utopian level", Charles just made that up. The fact is that for all of civilisation the global mean surface temperature varied only slowly and over a small range. We are now pushing it way above anything we as humans have experienced before, since we evolved. Whether or not Charles or anyone else regards civilisation as Utopia, we're moving out of it.

Desperate Deniers: Larry Kummer, replication of ice melt and other climate changes

There was another tattered, mixed up article from Larry Kummer, Editor of the Fabius Maximus Website, at WUWT a couple of days ago (archived here).  He was postulating that the big experiment being conducted on the planet can't or won't be replicated. I hope he's right, if there is a replicate planet somewhere out there. I hope that any inhabitants of that replicate planet don't do what we're doing, for their own sake and that of their world. Larry's headline was: "Climate science might become the most important casualty of the replication crisis".

Larry has picked up on studies that show that in some fields of science, particularly those disciplines in which experiments can only use tiny sample sizes, there have been shown to be problems in replicability. There would not be many climate-related studies that fit these criteria. In any case, Larry was talking more about climate science in general, or perhaps climate modeling only.

Walt Cunningham's Conspiracy Theory: Climate Science is a Hoax

Strange what possesses a man after he retires and looks to retain purpose in life, any purpose, any friends. Even fake friends who'll foster his paranoia and shamelessly exploit it. This was plastered at WUWT the other day as part of the latest Heartland Institute's "climate hoax" conspiracy theory.

“The president obviously does not know that he is participating in one of the greatest scientific hoaxes in history.”

Walter Cunningham
Apollo 7 Astronaut and Author
Policy Advisor
The Heartland Institute

What WUWT and the anti-world movement doesn't know - Earth Day 2016

This Earth Day, leaders from 175 nations signed the Paris Climate Agreement, which was a record for a one-day signing, according to the UN.

On this day each year there's also a tradition, if you can call it that yet, that anti-environment blogs like WUWT publish a list of unsourced quote-mines purportedly from the first Earth Day. Anti-environmentalists say that predictions didn't come to pass. The unspoken message is that therefore they will never come to pass and all their anti-environment fans can therefore feel free to continue to destroy the planet. It's an unspoken plea to "bring back smog".

Open thread, plus deniosphere update

I've been busy on a couple of things this week so am a bit behind in denier-oogling. There isn't a lot happening. Deniers are probably licking their wounds from all the record hots, and biding their time waiting until the El Niño dissipates. It's three weeks now since there was an ice age cometh article at WUWT :)

There is the usual irony. WUWT, a blog that specialises in climate disinformation, had an article about accuracy and trust in science (archived here).  On the same day, it published yet another grossly inaccurate article by Albert Parker aka Alberto Boretti about sea level (archived here). And it also had an article by Anthony Watts (archived here) about a dip in total solar irradiance - of around 1 W/m², out of 1360 W/m² - with Anthony writing: "If nothing else, this demonstrates that sunspots can have quite a large, if only temporary, forcing  on TSI and Earth’s received energy budget." Yeah, right. A huge temporary forcing, isn't it. About 0.074% large!

Beyond loopy: Latest Judith Curry-ism: the Earth could be flat after all

Judith Curry has tipped into "beyond denier weirdness". She's picked up an article that looks as if it first appeared at WUWT three years ago (archived here) - and who knows where Anthony Watts dug it up from. Anyway, according to Judith Curry (see here), if scientists generally agree about something then it's evidence of a lack of evidence of that something. Yes. You read that right.

Credit: Plognark

Here is what Judith Curry thought so nice she quoted it thrice (here and here and here):

In our view, the fact that so many scientists agree so closely about the [causes of the] earth’s warming is, itself, evidence of a lack of evidence for [human caused] global warming – D. Ryan Brumberg and Matthew Brumberg

Hottest March on record, tracking El Niño, and a year to date comparison

Yes, it's another hottest on record, this time in March 2016. According to GISS NASA, the average for March was 1.28 °C, which is 0.36 °C above the previous hottest March, in 2010. It's the second highest anomaly for any month, the highest being last month, February, which was 1.34 °C.

The average for the three months to the end of March is 1.25 °C, which is 0.39 °C higher than any previous Jan-March period. The previous highest was last year with an anomaly of 0.86 °C. This is the sixth month in a row of "hottest months", all of which had an anomaly more than one degree Celsius above the 1951-1980 mean. Update: I did a quick check and that hasn't happened before in the record since at least the 1950s. Earlier times probably aren't sufficiently accurate on a month by month basis to say and, in any case, pre-1950s temperatures would probably have been hotter at some time in the last couple of millenia.

Below is a chart of the month of March only:

Figure 1 | Global mean temperature anomaly - month of March only. Data source: GISS NASA.

Oddity of the Week: McCarthyism is alive, just, barely, at WUWT

There is not much happening at WUWT today. The only item of interest is that the AGU Board has deliberated on whether to continue to accept sponsorship from Exxon and has decided that yes, it will.

The other item (vaguely related) that I thought worth commenting on was the WUWT Quote of the Week article (archived here). Not the article itself, it was the discussion underneath (see below). The quote itself was lame. Just another dime-a-dozen fossil fuel shill called Alex Epstein saying the same old thing. Here's Anthony's quote of the week:

As long as your life is being made possible by the people in the fossil fuel industry, I think you should be grateful, and I think it is a crime — a moral crime — that you are damning anyone by association,” “I wish Sen. Whitehouse were here because what he is doing to the free speech of those companies and anyone associated with them is unconstitutional and I think he should apologize or resign,”

Seriously - by investigating harmful disinformation campaigns, Senator Whitehouse is threatening the free speech of mega-companies - and acting unconstitutionally? Give us a break! Deniers are getting very hard up for material these days.

Is there a denial of twilight? - with Judith Curry and Mario Loyola

Earlier this week Judith Curry claimed that the "climate movement" is in twilight. Her headline was the deniosaur's plaintive hope "Twilight of the Climate Change Movement". I don't know what was going through Judith's mind when she wrote that. Was it that global warming will go away soon? Was it that the science of the past two centuries is nothing more than a "movement"? Whatever it was, it is evidence that Judith wants to continue to cement her place in the science denial movement.

Judith's evidence of twilight or movement or something was a copy and paste from an article by a science denier from the USA called Mario Loyola (who gets some minor mentions at DeSmog Blog). Judith emphasised some of the passages she liked, which were straight from the climate conspiracy handbook. She wrote:

I excerpted about a third of Loyola’s essay, highlighting the parts that I find most insightful. 

(I'm not sure Judith's excerpting without any substantive critique or analysis would pass the fair use test.) I read Mario Loyola's article at The American Interest (you only get one shot before you have to pay). It was your run-of-the-mill gish gallop complaining about efforts to mitigate global warming, with the sciency bits mostly about "ice age" and "CO2 is plant food". Mario wants us to adapt to multi-meter sea level rise rather than reduce the impact of climate change.

Judith said she highlighted the bits that she found insightful. Here's my take: